But Ormus Cama is away in a Bombay record store, talking to a tall under-age beauty about the authorship of “Heartbreak Hotel.”
Mira’s shouting. Ormus? Did you hear what I said?
Yeah, Ormus whispers. He’s actually humming the song.
Don’t go crazy on me, Ormus. You’re not so crazy now. I need to know your answer on this right away.
What’s that? asks Ormus Cama, quietly. Vina Apsara? Oh, I’m sorry, she died.
18
DIES IRAE
Oangry day, O angry day, When Time, like ash, will blow away. That’s what King David and the Sibyl say.
In the West the earthquakes have stopped and the construction teams have moved in. Banks and insurance companies are building their new palaces over the faults, as if to assert the primacy of their authority, even over the misbehaving earth itself. The scars left by the quakes are being transformed into regeneration zones, gardens, office blocks, cineplexes, airports, malls. People have already started to forget and so, inevitably, resent those who remember. Ormus Cama and VTO, among others, are accused of negativity and scaremongering, because they continue to play the Quakershaker songs and their new gospel-influenced arrangement of Thomas of Celano’s ancient minatory lines.
In the South, however, the devastation continues. It’s as if the earth were discriminating against its most disadvantaged children. In India, where houses are built of mud and dreams, where the structures of life are fragile, their foundations weakened by corruption, poverty, fanaticism and neglect, the damage is immense. This is not pleasing to those who hold that India is not different from anywhere else, who deny that particularity of circumstance which makes a place itself. The fact is that the ground in America is not shaking, but some patch or other of Indian soil, one or another Indian city street, is hit by subterranean tremors almost every day.
To many third-world observers it seems self-evident that earthquakes are the new hegemonic geopolitics, the tool by which the superpower quake-makers intend to shake and break the emergent economies of the South, the Southeast, the Rim. The boastful triumphalism of the West during the revolutionary upheavals of 1989–90 has come back to haunt it. Now all earth tremors are perceived as Euro-American weapons, what were once classified by insurance brokers as acts of god are now close to being treated by entire states as acts of war, and the altruism with which ordinary Western citizens contribute to disaster relief funds, and even the indefatigable efforts of the international aid agencies, look like post-facto attempts at salving the guilty consciences of the powerful after the damage has been done. India, Pakistan, Israel, Syria, Iran, Iraq and China all announce the allocation of gigantic “plate wars” budgets. A new kind of weapons scramble has begun.
Exhaustive efforts by skeptical Western journalists and politicians to investigate and challenge the claims of responsibility made by their own military-industrial complex for the 1989–90 transglobal quakeathon are treated as disinformation by the participants in the new quake race, and interventions by international peace movements are largely ignored. Appeals from world leaders to the quake-racers to freeze their dangerously destabilizing new “rift bomb” building programs are branded arrogant and hypocritical. The U.N. Secretary-General’s shuttle-diplomacy initiative to persuade all relevant parties to attend an urgently convened HARF (Hands Across the Rifts and Faults) symposium, where they might enter constructively into conflict-resolution talks, is ineffective. There are mass public demonstrations in support of the decisions taken by the leaders of all the Seismic Seven. Self-respect and national pride are invoked and people declare themselves ready to let their children starve in order to acquire the ability to shake the world, which they appear to equate with victory in such other prestigious contests as the Miss World pageant and the soccer World Cup. The very walls of Delhi, Islamabad and the other seismohawk capitals shout pro-quake-technology slogans. No HARF measures. When we can quake land will be time to shake hand.
As the Indian earthquakes continue, local politicos continue to blame (as well as the West) the country’s traditional enemies to the north and northwest, and this creates a fevered public climate in which war is a constant possibility. Golmatol Doodhwala, widow of the assassinated Piloo, is a particular political beneficiary of this fist-shaking. In a century marked by the frequent rise to power of the widows of murdered men, the spherical, illiterate Golmatol, with her unceasing demands for revenge, is the latest in the line—perhaps the last, if she gets her warmongering way, and the world ends. Not with a bang but a shudder.
Everyone’s a New Quaker now.
Much that has lain hidden for years is thrown back into view by the unceasing tremors. When it is announced that the reborn VTO rock supergroup plans to add concert dates in Bombay and Delhi to its marathon tour schedule, and that at these dates O Angry Day and the Quakershaker songs will be played as part of the band’s efforts to support Western peace initiatives, the opposition to Ormus Cama’s return is orchestrated by an unexpected hand. From Tihar Jail, his elder brother Cyrus Cama issues a statement that wins wide public support.
Cyrus at sixty-one is still classified as dangerously insane and has never on any occasion requested parole. It is his firmly expressed view that he should remain in “my beloved Tihar” until the day of his death, for only in prison can he be safe from the fear that the Pillowman, who may yet sleep within him, might re-emerge to commit further hideous crimes. He is a multiple murderer, that is still true, of course; yet within the jail his gentle disposition continues to win him many friends. No matter how frequently his warders are changed they leave as his disciples, for Cyrus has become a wise man, having passed the years quietly, studiously, learning the ancient languages and mastering the old books, very much in the Darius Cama tradition. His Meditations on Kalki—Kalki, the last manifestation of Vishnu, who will come only to announce the end of the world—have been published in learned journals and reprinted as feuilletons and chapbooks by various small philosophical presses, and there are numerous university professors and excited students who consider him one of the deeper thinkers in the land, a voice for our troubled and conceivably terminal times. As a published writer of polish and note, and a man whose determinedly (if somewhat inevitably) simple life and principled self-denial are striking, Cyrus has become an emblem of what a man may do with his spell on earth once he accepts his given lot. His body is in prison but his spirit, as his fans admiringly put it, his spirit is a bird’s joyous song, sounding in an open sky.
To Ormus Cama, Cyrus elects to write an open letter, more in sorrow than in wrath: My brother, I regret so much to say, you have become a man who hates his own kind. This opening sentence ensures the wide publication of Cyrus’s ruefully polemical text in the Indian and then the global news media. Even Ormus’s recent statement opposing the quake wars is turned against him. Ormus began wryly: As for myself I control no weapons of mass destruction, so I hope to be excused the charge of hypocrisy when I say … ah, Cyrus offers mournful rebuttal, but my brother is too modest; for who was it that penned the regrettable ditties that have become the totemic anthems of the new Quake Age? We must not take Ormus Cama at his own low estimate, as a mere troubadour or popster; for his self-hating, deracinated music has long been at the service, I would even say at very heart, of the arrogance of the West, where the world’s tragedy is repackaged as youth entertainment and given an infectious, foot-tapping beat.
What Cyrus initiates, others eagerly take up. The government’s favorite godmen of the moment, Ulurishi and the Aurhum Baba, announce that the former Indian and lapsed Zoroastrian “seismopro-pagandist” Ormus Cama must indeed bear a heavy responsibility for the West’s quake-inducing “doomsday scenario”; that his songs and performances are open attacks on intercultural as well as intracultural stability; and that accordingly he and his collaborators should under no circumstances be permitted to perform on Indian soil. Within days of the Rishi and Baba’s unprecedented joint communiqué, Interior Minister Golma
tol Doodhwala (whose Pilooist faction has just agreed to prop up the shaky governing coalition, the Interior Ministry being the price of Golmatol’s support) confirms that all VTO tour personnel, including the band members, themselves have been refused entry visas in the public interest, and also in their own, because in the present heated climate their personal safety cannot be guaranteed.
So the past reaches up its claw for Ormus, grabs his ankle and seeks to drag him down. And after the Cyrus letter is published, the hate mail from India multiplies. Violence is threatened, but that’s nothing new. For years a dozen Vina wannabes a week have been threatening to kill Ormus and/or themselves for his failure to love them, for restricting himself in what they consider an unhealthy way to the starvation diet of his dead wife’s memory, thus denying himself the opportunity to partake of the banquets of love that are on offer all around. Ormus has never taken such menaces seriously, and in spite of Clea Singh’s concerns, this new Ormus, Ormus in his cocoon, Ormus in the strangely absent mood he’s been in ever since Mira made him face the Vina facts, this vague, wafting Ormus is also immune to his angry subcontinental correspondents’ new darts. The Singhs, at Clea’s insistence, are nevertheless on ready alert for trouble.
When news of the Indian ban reaches the Sangrias in New York, they decide that Cyrus Cama is the hot unwritten story of the VTO phenomenon, and make arrangements to travel to Delhi on the first available flight.
O angry days, O angry nights. This is how I think of the two long years of ending that followed the three deaths of Vina Apsara: as the nights and days of wrath. O final, departed times.
I think that Vina died the first time in the abyss at El Huracán, the second time very slowly, as the world turned her into its iconic Vina Divina and lost its grip on her quirky humanity until finally Clea Singh erased her voice from her own answering machine, and her third and final death occurred when my darling Mira Celano forced Ormus Cama who loved Vina best to speak the words that killed her for all time to come. After he spoke those words Ormus knew that he had severed the last tie that held him down to earth, and having lost all joy in life he began to look for death, to gaze into the faces of everyone he met as if he were asking, is it you? Please, friend, stranger, let it be you that brings me the gift I’m waiting for.
The Into the Underworld tour was conceived as a giant traveling memorial to Vina, whose Mira-simulacrum no longer appeared on stage but with whose silent, slo-mo image dancing across the giant Vidiwall behind the stage the show began and ended. This decision, too, was criticized in some quarters for over-commercializing the memory of a latter-day saint and was even described as a blatant attempt to cash in on a terminally rocky marriage, but Ormus continued to be impervious to criticism, to smile his quiet smile and go on down his chosen road. A man has to belong to something, even if it’s just a golf club or a pet dog, and Ormus belonged to a memory now. Only the thing he had lost could hurt him; he belonged to her, and to music.
For most of 1994 and 1995 he lived exclusively in the world of the tour, an ersatz underworld environment tiered like the circles of Hell and enclosed in a giant arc by the largest Vidiwall ever built, from which the audience was nightly bombarded by incessant images of heaven and hell, both conceived of as places on earth, nuptial motels and flame-grilled-burger bars, video arcades and ballet schools, football crowds and war zones, ice deserts and political rallies, surf beaches and libraries, and it was up to each individual to decide which images were celestial, which infernal. This techno-inferno had been realized for him by the McWilliam design team but its essential concept was Ormus’s own. Having created his fiction he plunged into it and did not come out for two years. The fictional universe of the show gave the impression of floating free of the real world, of being a separate reality that made contact with the earth every so often, for a night or two at a time, so that people could visit it and shake their pretty things. Voluntarily imprisoning himself within the private continuum of rock ’n’ roll, Ormus Cama, too, became a floating entity, more otherworldly alien than human being, more show than O.
He moved from hotel floors stripped of superfluities, transformed into white spaces and supplied with white pianos, audiovideo editing suites and old Tuscan bread ovens, via limousines with blackened windows whose purpose was not so much to prevent people looking in as to make it impossible to see out, into that stadium environment which was always the same wherever in the world he might be, and in this illusion of continuity he found it possible for the moment to survive. When it was time to fly on the band’s specially refitted 727 he took sleeping pills and did not wake up until it was time once again to enter the closed world of limousine and white hotel and underworld set which was now the only place on earth he needed to be or see.
It was as if the show were staying put while the world rushed past outside the stadium, as if the show were the permanence and human life the transient thing, as if the stadium was always the same stadium, and the limo was always the same car, always driven by Will Singh with Clea Singh by Ormus’s side, and the hotel floor where he spent all his off-stage time baking and eating bread was always the same hotel floor, but the cities outside its windows came and went like the lands at the top of the Faraway Tree.
Rio, Sydney, London, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Beijing: these places weren’t real. The Indian ban wasn’t important, because India wasn’t real, it was just another transit zone. The changing colors and races of the faces in the crowd, the parade of celebrities who came backstage to drink with him and eat the home-baked bread he insisted on offering them, the local heroes and tour sponsors and cover girl beauties who munched away politely on his loaves and told him lies about how well he looked, none of these mattered, because they were illusions too. Only the show was real. The show, the music, was home. Outside that fiction, the cosmos was a fake.
He stood on his imagination, on what he had conjured out of nowhere, what did not, could not, would not exist without him. Now that it had been made, he existed only within it. Having created this territory, he trusted no other ground.
During the show the weight of light hitting the stage was so burdensome that in truth he could barely see the crowd, just the first few rows and beyond it a great roaring beast he had to tame, to play as if it were an instrument, but this was something he knew, this was his real life. The lion tamer in the lion’s cage, putting his head into the jaws of the beast, knows that this is his true reality and the cheering, brightly colored, balloons-and-popcorn world beyond the bars is trivial, a painted backdrop, a set. So also Ormus in the bubble of the show was perfectly comfortable, perfectly at home, and by general consent his performances were extraordinary, his guitar never more achingly clear, like a desert wanderer’s dream of water in a cool clean well, his singing never so subtle or so strong. The weak voice of recent times had vanished and in its place was this mighty instrument, more powerful than it had ever been in the old days when Vina herself was pouring her coloratura music over the world.
At the end of each show the other band members would murmur to each other in wonderment, almost fearful of what was coming out of him. Even LaBeef and Bath had to admit they had never seen him be so unbelievable over so long a period. It’s like he’s a jet on afterburners, Patti LaBeef said one night, he can burn double the fuel because he knows he don’t have to save none for the journey home. Once she had said that all the band members understood that he was dying, that the fuel he was using on stage was life itself. He was burning himself up in the fire of his art, each night’s show was not only a gift to Vina but a step towards the oblivion, the not-being, where she lay with his joy in her keeping; he knew that when the show was over he would no longer need to sing or speak or move or breathe or be. After that the musicians began to think of him as a creature from another world, because they could see how hard he was trying to get there, maybe some world through a gash in the air, some variant dimension where Vina was still alive. But there were no longer such gashes for him, for anyone, to se
e. lil dagover said to Mira, Ever since I can remember I was a fan of theirs, this is so hard to watch, but listen, at least he isn’t guttering and choking like some dime-store candle, this is a fucking flameout, a supernova, a real star’s way to go.
(In reality the continuity of the show was maintained by doing everything in triplicate. Because the stage took a week to build, three different steel crews leapfrogged around the world, putting it up and tearing it down. There was always one stage being dismantled at the last venue, a second stage ready for action at the current stadium, and a third stage being built at the next stop down the road.
Then there was the energy requirement. Into the Underworld pumped out four million watts of power, produced by six-thousand-horsepower generators. The three hundred and fifty cabinets in the sound system accounted for one and a half million of these watts. There were also two thousand lights, which means you could have watched the show from the moon.
Six million people paid to watch the shows. Twenty million CDs and cassettes were sold. Hundreds of millions of dollars were made. If Ormus Cama imagined he was standing still while the world revolved around him, maybe he wasn’t so very wrong. Such is the power of imagination.)
Out on the end of a long “finger” that ended in a great maw—intended to suggest the Gate of Hell and guarded by a three-headed animatronic Cerberus—was a small secondary stage on which Ormus was initially discovered, alone, like Orpheus at Aornum in Thesprotis, contemplating his terrible descent. On this stage Ormus played his opening solo, an acoustic version of “Beneath Her Feet,” while Vinas image towered over the stadium on the Vidiwall. (As it was an acoustic solo, he could perform it unenclosed, standing in the open air, without further damaging his ears.) At the end of the song the mechanical dog lay down and slept and Ormus stepped into a clear bubble which moved forward on a track and was “swallowed” by the Maw. Now, under the catwalk linking the stages, he was transported to the main stage at high speed by the fastest-moving walkway in production, and burst into McWilliam’s fantasy Hades where the other band members awaited him, as well as a zoo of flame-belching iron demons, giant inflatables and citizens of Pandemonium who were both costumed mimes and machines. Inset into the stage floor was a complex system of tracks and points, so Ormus was able to move around the great set without leaving his bubble; at one point, in a tremendous coup de theatre, it was grasped by metal arms and became a glass elevator which rocketed Ormus high into the sky above the shrieking crowd. Thus bubbled Ormus no longer seemed separated from the action; the bubble became a metaphor of life, of his continued membership in the world of the living during his adventure in the country of the dead.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet Page 67
